FEATURES

AN INTERVIEW WITH TOM DE HAVEN

Michaux
Dempster:
This is Michaux Dempster,
and I am interviewing Tom De Haven about his new novel It’s Superman! (Chronicle
Books, 2005). Tom, thank you very much for coming.

Tom De Haven:
Well, thank you.

MD: For the first question that I have is about when DC Comics contacted
you, it was, was it 1996?

TD: Ninety-seven.

MD: Ninety-seven? OK. How did you feel when you realized
that they were contacting you about writing a novel about Superman?

TD: Well, it was actually very flattering, of
course. But the worry that I had immediately was should I do a novel
with a character that I don’t
own? So I had to think about it, but I didn’t think about it very long,
really. I just thought this is, this is too good to let go, and since
they were giving me carte blanche pretty much I figured I’d go with it,
and I haven’t regretted it at all. It’s fun.

MD: You’ve been a really avid reader of comics and graphic novels since
you were a boy. Can you talk about how you began to be fascinated by
comics?

TD: Yeah, I think
that has a lot to do with how I grew up to be a narrative writer. From
the very beginning when
I was six or seven years old I . . . well, first of all, I found this
comic book once when I was seven, and the cover was so fascinating to
me that
I was trying to decode it. It was a Dick Tracy comic book and I didn’t
know who Dick Tracy was, but it had this character running through the
rain, and in the front,
in the foreground, was this woman with no eyeballs sitting against a
boulder with two little children next to her, and one of the children
was glowing in the dark. I had no idea what this was but I remember picking
this up and looking at it and making a story about it. This is great.
This is bizarre. That’s when I began. Of course I bought that
comic book and then found a newspaper strip with these four pals, and
I was trying to figure out how all this worked and what was the story.
So I think that my fascination with the comic strips comes back to, I
mean really fed my fascination with storytelling, I think, and the visual
verbal blending, the words and the pictures, I think, have a
great deal to do with how I write. So yeah, so it’s always been
there, since like I was six or seven years old.

MD: And you .
. . was it a Dick Tracy strip that you actually you found it buried .
. . somewhere?

TD: I found it.
I found this old newspaper buried in the in the dirt under an old summer
house, and I pulled it out and it was a year old and
I found a strip in there and tore it out, which I still have. I have
it in a scrapbook. But I remember looking at this thing and just wondering
who these people were and how the progression was from pal to pal and
what was the story. And so I think I taught myself, and this
is not uncommon for a lot of people who are interested in comics, I taught
myself how to read reading comic strips when I was very, very young.
But I also think I taught myself how to tell stories, or at least
got fascinated by stories by reading comics.

MD: Sure. Because
so much happens between the panels and you have to decode that . . .

TD: You have to fill it in. Yeah, fill it in.

MD: If you were to play a game of connect the dots starting with your
first experience with comics and ending with the writing of It’s
Superman!,
what would the main points, the main dots, of that progression be?

TD: I think that’s
fairly interesting, and easy. I wanted to be a cartoonist up until I
was in college, and so I drew comic strips. And then, when
I got into college, my drawing abilities seem to have come to a dead
stop, but I still loved writing stories. So by the time I got out of
college I was writing fiction, but I wasn’t drawing anymore, and
I got a scholarship to go to an MFA program. And at the end of the program
we had to make a kind of five-year plan. For one thing we had to do our
thesis, and we had to do our thesis defense, and we had to, like, what
are we going to do? And so I had this idea I wanted to do this novel
about comic strips and the whole history of comic strips in fictionalized
form.
So this is like 1973, I had this idea, and I didn’t start the book
until 1980, which was the Funny Papers trilogy. So that
led me to writing this series of novels throughout the Eighties and
Nineties and it’s about the history of comics from the 1890s
through the 1970s. And because of that, those were the, those
are the books that DC Comic editors saw and liked, and so they called
and asked me
if I would like to do the Superman book. So it’s a very direct
route.

MD: And you used
a lot of the history and the research that you did, obviously for the Funny
Papers trilogy, for It's Superman! as
well.

TD: Oh yeah,
especially, the second book in the trilogy was set in the 30’s,
and that was set in like one month of 1936, December
of 1936, and
Superman goes from 1935 to 1938. So I had to do some research on the
other ends. But I certainly had my basic Thirties research down. And
I’ve taught Thirties classes, “History and Culture of the
1930s,” so I’m
probably more familiar with the 1930s than I am with our own time.

MD: So did you know a lot about Superman, the character, in the comic
stories? Had you read a lot of Superman strips before you were contacted
to do this? Or did you have to do a lot of specific Superman research?

TD: Well, I knew
Superman from my boyhood. There was the Superman of the Fifties
and Sixties, and then the
Chris Reeve movies, and the George
Reeves television show. I knew that Superman, and I had some
idea of the earlier Superman because of my research into comics, but
when I agreed to do this, DC Comics began sending me their archive books,
bound
books, of all the early Superman stories from 38 and 39 and 40, 41. And
plus I got all of the comic strips from the newspapers of Superman, and
that was very surprising because Superman was very, very different in
those days. He was a kind of skinny little guy who looked a little like
a dark-haired James Cagney. No, he wasn’t muscle bound, and he
also very, very political in a sense that he came along with the Depression
and
he was a kind of junior New Deal-er who, what he did in the
first couple of years was not fight any super-villains or anything, but
was to clear slums, and expose corrupt politicians. And my favorite
stories is when he destroys a couple of Detroit automobile factories
because they’re producing unsafe cars, and this is like 1938, 1939.
So he was very, very political. He was created by these two
young
Jewish kids who were very much into FDR and what was going on then. Once
he became Superman, and a corporate entity, and so, so valuable, that
part of him was less evident in the comic books. But he does change,
as you know he’s almost 70 years old, so I went back to the original
Superman and made him kind of ordinary looking and not muscle-bound,
and trying to get someone in the story who kind develops a certain social
conscience and, as he is going through the 1930’s and seeing what’s
going on.

MD: Sure, sure,
and then, the novel, I remember there are parts when he goes and he sees,
not race riots, but people doing things
that are very prejudice and policeman acting unconscionably . . .

TD: Killing some guy, right, burning down a courthouse.

MD: . . . and
Superman gets really upset about this.

TD: Those stories, by the way, particularly that one which took place
in Texas, is real. Of course I’ve put Superman into it, but that’s, that
particular story, about a black man who was being tried for murder and
then this white mob burned the courthouse. And to protect this prisoner
they put him in the safe, they locked him in the safe. And then the building
got so bad that everybody else ran out, and this poor guy was burned
to death in the safe.

MD: Goodness.

TD: So that story
was real, I just put Superman into it. But all those things that he sees
going around in the 1930s was actual, was real.

MD: That is really
different from the Superman that I think most people know, where he is
fighting the super-villains and
Lex Luthor. And I think
that does say a lot about the culture in the 1930s, and what people
wanted in their superheroes.

TD: The thing you have to remember is that he was the first. I don’t
think that’s the reason, necessarily, why he stayed around seventy years,
but it certainly was important that he was the first. And what he could
do those guys could just make it up. I mean there was no precedent for
this kind of character, so they made him very much like themselves, a
nerdy guy in real life and their fantasy figure and elsewhere.

MD: Sure, with
the glasses.

TD: With the glasses, well, so did both of those
guys who created him wore glasses.

MD: Isn’t that funny.

TD: Couldn’t get a date.

MD: That’s probably part of the appeal, isn’t it, with Superman and
other superheroes in general? A lot them have these sort of nerdy alter
egos where they have trouble, trouble like regular old people do, and
then they can transform all of the sudden and do these amazing things
that no one would believe.

TD: Oh, yeah, that’s why it appeals to 10, 11, 12,
13-year-olds just on the verge of adolescence. I’m sure that whole idea
that, “Yeah I may look like a nerd, and I can’t do anything, but
underneath I’m really certain I’m special.”

MD: And nobody knows it but me.

TD: And nobody knows it.

MD: One thing
I was very surprised about when I read the novel was that you put Superman
into a 1930s, very historically
accurate New York,
rather than Metropolis, and can you talk about how you made that decision?

TD: Well, yeah,
I mean I wanted to do a realistic novel that’s
set in the real 1930s. So I had the problem, well, Metropolis isn’t
a real city, and I could I have gone the route of the stories, but I
just
thought, well, I know New York so well in the 1930s, for one thing.
I wrote two novels set in the 1930s in New York, it was a wonderful
time,
and if I began to make things up it wouldn’t be half as fascinating:
the theater and the politics and things. And so I decided to put it into
New York. Which in the comic books it’s always assumed
that Metropolis is either New York or Chicago or one of these big cities,
but in fact, when Siegel and Shuster created Superman, it was Cleveland.
Superman was originally in Cleveland.

MD: Oh, isn’t that funny.

TD: The first
couple of stories they actually call it Cleveland. And not only that,
but it’s Cleveland, but the skyscrapers are Toronto
because Joe Shuster used Toronto because that’s where he was born.
So you have an amalgam of Toronto and Cleveland, which is where Superman
was, and I knew neither of those cities so I figured, well, where would
Superman go if he, where would anyone go in the 1930s, or now, if they
were going to try to break into newspapers or media or radio or television?
You’d go to New York.

MD: Sure.

TD: So that’s why I moved that there.

MD: The voice
of the novel really struck me, just the first few pages. It’s very streetwise,
very snappy, lots of 1930s slang that I wasn’t
quite sure what it meant, but it just gave the novel this real atmosphere.
Right away it just put you in this fictional time and place. How did
you go about creating that voice? What kinds of decisions did you make
about vocabulary and sort of how cynical-slash-innocent you wanted it
to sound?

TD: That’s
a good question. I don’t know. I’m a totally undisciplined,
untrained researcher, and it turns out, I mean
I didn’t intend this,
my career, to be mostly about books which I had to research and are set
in other periods of time. That’s . . . I didn’t start out
to do that. And so when I started doing that I didn’t have any
idea how to research, but what I’ve come to do is not only read
histories of the times, but what I really try to do is read newspapers,
magazines, fiction, plays,
all that kind of stuff that was written or produced, published in the
actual time period that I want, which is how I get a lot of the details,
how I get a lot of the slang, which I know it’s right because it
was in a novel or a play published the same year that I’m writing.
And I do collect books of slang, and my approach to writing is to use
very
colloquial
American English, and and there is nothing snappier than 1930s,
1940s
American English. And so it’s fun. Gotta watch out
you don’t put too much into it, so it seems like a parody of that
kind of stuff, but I really do love trying to imitate, not only speech
patterns,
but a certain kind of a literary mode of the 1930s, which is a
kind of a pulp mixed with a neo-realism, or a socialist
realism, that kind of stuff in the theater. That’s how
I go do it, it’s half-assed but it somehow comes together.

MD: Yeah, it definitely does. And I think you’re right. It’s sort of
this streetwise, but very authentic, kind of sound that the whole novel
has.

TD: Well, one
of the things I do when I’m researching,
too, is I always figure out when these, my characters, were born, and
then I figure out
when they went to school and what was going on in their lives when they
were young. And then I figure out those things must have had an impact
on them. So if I’m doing Mr. Kent, I figure he was born
like not too long after the Civil War. And what would it have been like
for
him growing up then? And then Clark coming along in, during, World War
I, so he was growing up in the Twenties. So those kinds of things I
take into account when I am trying to create characters so that they
seem
products of their
own time rather than mine.

MD: One thing
that I always noticed about you, both in the classes that I’ve
had with you, in graduate level MFA writing classes, and in your
books, is your ability to just sort of be really off the cuff
with these ideas about character and plot. You’ll do it in our
workshops and you’ll say, “Well, what about this? Why don’t
you have your character do such and such?” And it will be something
that would have taken me all day to think of. And you seem
to have an endless supply
of these ideas, and in It’s Superman!, I really noticed
it because even the minor characters have these little details about
them. The villains
have family problems. There’s this one guy that has
a dad that puts him down and talks down to him all the time
and
doesn’t think he’s good for anything, and just different
little tidbits about the characters. How do you come up with so many?
What’s your secret?

TD: Well, there
is no . . . I guess it’s just a kind of that’s how I’m
made. I just kind of make up things or think of things, but I keep notebooks
all the time and put down little things, and also I’ll just
jot down odd little business that I read about. For instance, in the
Superman
story there was . . . there’s a character who is one of
Lex Luthor’s
henchmen, but he’s a defrocked Catholic priest, and how that
came about is I was reading something about the 1930s and it
said that there were a lot of men who went into the seminary after
the Depression began
because they couldn’t get any other work. They had no vocation,
no religious vocation, but it was a way of getting off the street,
getting
fed, getting housed, getting clothed, and I thought, Well, that’s
an interesting predicament. What if you kind of got into that and then
you realized, Oh, God, but I really am a priest now. I have no vocation,
I’m fed, but I’m really bored. And that’s
how I created that character.

So I had this thing in the back of my head for a
long time. This would be interesting, but if someone gets involved in
this what would you
do? So that’s where
it came from, and I just jot all of these little things down. And what I’ll
generally do with a character is start with one little quirk, like Lex Luthor
is in the midst of all of this racism and xenophobia of the 1930s. Here’s
this incredibly villainous, awful man who will not tolerate anyone using racial
epithets around him. This is a really interesting quality, but when
you look back under it he doesn’t want anybody using racial epithets
because he doesn’t think anybody’s worthwhile, including the people
he’s chastising.
But I thought that was an interesting quality, that he would be much more advanced
in thinking in the 1930s, or at least seem that way. So I played with
that, and then out of little quirky things that don’t quite fit together
you make a character. The little trick of it is that you put things
that don’t add up, you put something where someone is actually
villainous, and you put something where he’s really, really good to his
mother, and then the character has certain body to him because he’s not
one note. So that’s
the trick version of the answer. Of the other thing is that I just kind of
try to keep all of these things in notebooks and try and use them, put disparate
things together and see if they create something interesting.

MD: Yeah, I think
it’s the disparity that probably makes the characters
really come alive, like you say you wouldn’t expect Lex Luthor
to have a conscience or the appearance of one, of anything. But giving
him the
characteristics about, like you said, the racial epithets, not being
able to tolerate them, and being so good to his mother. How did you
come up with his family history? Lex Luthor has a really interesting
past in this novel.

TD: Well, it’s
interesting, cause when you take these characters in, there’s
things like The Encyclopaedia of Superman! and stuff, so I
was reading all this stuff and everybody has histories in the comic books,
in movies,
but
they’re all different. It depends on what comic book,
or what year, or what movie, and so the Smallville Lex
Luthor is way different from my Lex Luthor. So, well first of all, I
wanted to have a certain connectedness between these two characters who
don’t meet for almost 400 pages in the novel, but I
wanted them to have similarities. Like Clark is an exile. He’s
an alien who just comes to this place where he doesn’t belong,
and Lex Luthor is kind of an exile from where he is because his father’s
a murderer and the family has to take off and assume all of these different
identities.
So I had this certain thing where Clark has to assume identities and
Lex has to assume identities and they’re both
displaced people. And so I was trying to play with these two things,
how
one could turn out to be heroic from this experience, and how one could
turn out to be absolutely villainous and despicable from these experiences.
And so that was . . . I was trying to keep a parallel throughout. In
the earlier version there was much more about his history, and I had
to cut
it because
it was the way longer version of the novel. So he
was even more interesting I think in first version.

MD: Is that the
thing that you miss most about the longer version, the thousand-page
version, of the novel?

TD: Well,
I liked that, I liked Lex Luthor, and I had much more. He was much more
connected to Smallville. His father was, did the murder
in Smallville, and there was all these kind of connections between the
Kent family and the Luthor family in the original version, and that was
very interesting to me, but very complicated, so I took it out. So I
do miss that, but there, what I did when I cut the book was basically
not just cut things about particular characters, but I cut whole characters
out, which was painful, but it was probably less structurally damaging
than something else that I might have done.

MD: I see, so
rather than cut plot points . . .

TD: . . . or make scenes shorter, or things like
that. I took out whole threads of characters that don’t exist anymore
in the book. Like there’s this
Russian spy, which I really loved. She was kind of a Mata Hari kind of
thing, kind a character, who was trying to get, get the robots and bring
them back to the Soviet Union. But I had to leave her out. She was good.
She was really good.

MD: You always
remember the stuff that you had to cut out. How long did it take you?
You wrote the novel, to me, fairly quickly. I
remember you started at your writer’s retreat up in Maine one summer
and came back with like 200 pages finished then. And then you pretty
much got to a thouand pages by the spring of that following year. And
you had done all of your research and everything.

TD: Yeah, I had
done all of the research, I mean the book, actually because I knew I
was going to do it from ’97
on, although I was doing
other projects and I didn’t sign the contract till 2001. I was
doing research whenever I could, I mean, I knew I was going to be doing
this next Thirties novel, so I didn’t just start the research when
I signed the contract in 2001. But I didn’t have to do a lot
of research after I did the contract. But if it wasn’t for that
writer’s
retreat up in Maine, on Norton Island, I don’t know how I would
have gotten this thing done because I had about forty pages done when
I went up there the
first summer and, you’re right, I wrote about 150 pages in three
weeks. It was just amazing. And then I worked, I had about 200 pages,
and then
I worked all year long.

I actually did get to go back to the island again
and work, pretty much finished, the novel the following summer. So it
took, well actually, I remember I signed the contract sometime in January
2001, so from September 2001 till September 2004. I guess so that’s
basically three years, that’s a long time. I used to
write novels a lot faster, but also this was a thiusand pages.
It’s
also a very plotted novel, which I’m generally not very good at,
but I wanted to plot this thing out. And so it took a long time.
But when I had the thousand-page version, which they gave back to me,
I think, in the beginning of December last year and said, “We need
this back this back by January 30
and you need to cut half of this novel.” So after Christmas, I
think, like the day after Christmas, or maybe it was the day after New
Year’s,
it was somewhere when I could finally could get way from the house because
of Christmas holidays and stuff, I just went down to Virginia Beach and
stayed there till I cut this thing.

MD: I remember that. And I remember you saying that you were going,
and you really did. You just disappeared, and you went down there.

TD: Yeah, there
was no other way I could have done it—nobody around, I didn’t
know a soul in Virginia Beach. I figured it would be kind of deserted.
At least the boardwalk hotels would be deserted. And it
was. There was nobody there, and I was just, I had to get up in
the morning and go out and get a cup of coffee and come back to the room
and work until dinner time and then go try to find someplace or order
room service and work for another three hours. It was pretty intense,
but I’m really glad I did it.

MD: And that was all cutting, just all day long?

TD: Was cutting,
cutting and rearranging. Yeah, a lot of things that had been like woven
through the story I plucked out and put it in chronological
order rather than flashbacks and things like that.

MD: I see. So
a thousand pages. Have you ever had a manuscript that was that long before?

TD: Funny
Papers was nearly that, but I
signed a contract for Funny Papers in 1980 or ’81. It
was supposed to be this novel that would
start in the 1890s and it ended in the 1980s.
It was supposed to be all in one book, and then I started and the first
book that became
Funny Papers was about six to seven hundered pages that I
had written, what became part of the second novel. As I was
going
along,
and
I said to myself, “Oh, my God, this is going to be the world’s
longest novel when it gets published.” Andso then I talked to my
editor,
and at that time I had about a thousand pages, and the end was not in
sight. So we decided to just publish Funny Papers separately.
So that was, I
had done about a thousand pages on that one, but certainly Superman is the longest one after that.

MD: So you didn’t know that Funny
Papers was
going to be a trilogy when you first started? It was supposed to be just
one novel?

TD: It was supposed
to be one generational saga about a comic strip that goes from the 1890s
to the 1980s. But I got so interested
in the whole period, the nineties and the thirties and all this,
there’s
no way I could have done this so short.

MD: Why do you think, what is it about the way that you write that gets
the manuscript so long in the first place? Do you think it’s the speed
at which you write that you just get so many pages, because you write
in big chunks at a time? Or is it something else?

TD: Well, I really
get to do that, I mean, on Norton Island these past two or three summers.
You know I can get about twelve to fifteen pages of manuscript
a day, which is pretty amazing, but I sit down at my desk
around eight o’clock in the morning and get up around seven at
night, except for a walk during the day. But that doesn’t happen
except for those three or four weeks in the summer. I think what happens
is
that
I just
get
interested in these characters, I just get interested in who
they are, and then I begin to think of more things that they could do,
or what, and then I have to go research some things to make it plausible,
and then I get really involved in it and I just . . . in Superman there’s
all these minor characters that you mention that I really fell in love
with, those gangsters, and their molls, and the woman who owns
the bar in Newark, all of these minor characters. And I just wrote lots
and lots and lots about them. They became more real to me, and
then I knew that I would have to cut this stuff. But I don’t mind
that because the more I write the more real they are to me, and presumably
then they’re real, they’ll be realer to the reader. And when
I go back to cut them there’s still that reality that I put into,
invested in the characters is still going to be there even though it’s
much less page-wise.

MD: Another place
that I noticed that in It’s Superman! was, was Lois’s
boyfriends.

TD: Yeah Lois’s boyfriends.
I really like Lois’s boyfriends.

MD: She has a string of them.

TD: She does.
And I didn’t even know when I
first started that the guy who was the cop who was gonna be sitting
out, who was sitting outside
of the hospital room, the girl in the book would become a boyfriend of
her later. That just evolved, and I just . . . because she comes to go
to the hospital room, and he’s a cop, and he insists on taking
her pocketbook because she has like a scissors or nail file in there
and
he’s not
going to let her in with a prisoner. And she thinks, “He’s
cute, he’s
really cute,” and from that point on I said, “Well, maybe
she’ll
meet him again,” and I did, and so he became her other boyfriend
in the book. So these things just evolve, and that’s what’s
so much fun for me.

MD: How did you come up with the idea to put Clark in Hollywood as a
stuntman for a while? He goes out to California, and he works as a stuntman,
and of course he’s great because he can’t actually be hurt and he can
do all of these crazy things because of his powers. What made you think
of that?

TD: Well, first
of all, the idea was this was going to be a Thirties novel, which, if
I was going to do a Thirties novel,
I have to do a big city reporter kind of thing—which was the
end of the book, the New York section—and then I had to do a
kind of going
across America in the Thirties
and the Dust Bowl thing, like the Grapes of Wrath kind of thing
to it. That was the second part of the book, but I also thought if
you’re
going to do a Thirties novel, you have to somehow have Hollywood because
it was it was the ’Dream Capital’ of the world in the Thirties.
And I mean that everyone thinks, when they think of Hollywood, they think
of the Thirties
and Clark Gable, and all of those kind of people, and I thought it, Well,
gee, that would be fun to have them go there. I didn’t know
anything about California, really, in the Thirties, to be able to write
about it, so that was . . . took a lot of stuff where I had to read about
California.
And then I started reading about the movie industry, and then I started
reading about the smaller studios that you never hear about,
and suddenly I said, “Oh, God, yeah,” all of those crummy
little studios that made all those Zorro serials and Gene Autry and all
that
kind of stuff, that would be a job for him. Because he goes out to
California, he’s eighteen years old, nineteen years old, he has
no skills, but he can’t
be hurt, so why not try to go into the movies and be a stuntman and jump
off a
cliff? So I thought that was kind of natural, but it only evolved out
of me saying I know he has to go to California. And I didn’t know
when he was going to California if he was going to get involved in the
labor
strikes, because there was a lot of stuff in the agricultural, in the
big valleys and everything, there was a lot of stuff going on in the
Thirties, John Steinbeck also pointed out, or Hollywood. And at first
I had him do both, but again, when it was cut I just decided, well, the
Hollywood
would be the thing to stick to, especially since that’s how he
gets his costume.

MD: And it’s
a good connection to the opening of the book, too, because it opens with
Superman in a movie theater, Clark in a movie
theater helping the stop this robbery that’s going on. And then
he goes back to the movie theater later to think. So he’s got this
connection with the movies from the beginning, from the opening scene.

TD: Well, that’s
deliberate. He begins at a movie theater and ends at a legitimate theater.
There’s this
kind of thing, of a playfulness, like this is imaginary, but in a theater.
But that was deliberate.

MD: At what point in the writing did you decide to do that, to have
the theater connections?

TD: Well, I knew
I was going to have the theater connections in, and also have him say
someplace along the line that
being unique like this makes
him feel unreal, like a character in a story. So I knew I was going to
have this stuff about California, movies and movie theaters, and plays,
and all of that kind of stuff as little motifs running through the piece.
And I also knew, once I realized that Our Town premiered
in February, in 1938, and that’s always been my favorite play.
I never miss a production of Our Town anywhere. I’m
a sucker for that one. So I thought, Oh,
God, I have to have him go to the opening night of Our Town because
he’ll be in New York. But I didn’t know it would be the end
of the story. I thought it would be . . . I was gonna originally end
it in June of 1938,
which is when the first Action Comics with Superman was published, and
this is February. So I was going to put in a few more months, so it would
actually end in June, but then I said “Nah, this is close enough
to June,” and to end at the premiere of Our Town where
I could get all of these themes of the book, about everything
is connected
and the ordinariness of life, and how ordinary people are important.
And I thought, “Nah, this is perfect,” this is, and
I can get all of the cast together except for Lex Luthor in the theater
and basically do this kind of play on . . . it’s where I think
the end of the last chapter says that the cast takes a bow, which is
basically referring to the cast of Our Town, but it also
is the cast of the novel.

MD: One more
question, and then I think we’ll
be about done. You mentioned Smallville before. All that
has really come out since DC Comics first
contacted you. Smallville has gotten really popular, and
you see Superman lyrics in all kinds of pop songs, both before Smallville and
after, but it seems like there’s a Superman revival. There’s
a movie coming out around which you had to write your novel. Didn’t
you have a deadline so that the debut of the novel didn’t eclipse
or conflict with?

TD: Yep, if I
didn’t make that deadline last
January, I would have been in real trouble, because the movie is coming
out in June and they would
not let this book come out at the same time as that movie because of
the gearing of the movie, and the movie’s contemporary Superman,
and there’ll be novelizations and all kinds of stuff in the bookstores,
and they weren’t going to let my novel come out at that time. So
I thought, Oh,
my God, I had to, I made sure that it got done. But to answer your
question, it’s true. I told, or suggested to my editor, at DC,
because I have an editor at DC Comics, but I also have an editor at Chronicle
Books.
I said, “Why don’t you ever put out
a CD of all these Superman songs?” I mean there’s millions
of them. I went on the web, and looked at all of The
Kinks and Donovan and all these new ones, and “Kryptonite in My
Pocket” [“Pocket
Full of Kryptonite”] and all this stuff. And they said, well they,
don’t
think they hadn’t thought of it, but to get the rights to all these
things was a headache, so they hadn’t done it.

But yeah, there’s . . . Superman appears in
songs, constantly, which is really strange. And Smallville,
I mean I started this book, agreed to do it,
before Smallville came along, which is odd, because some reviews
have been saying that I did this, this is my version of Smallville,
but I started before Smallville. I was first.
And then there’s Superman coming out this summer.
Why? I don’t know. This is the last question.
I think that Superman is a really valid American hero, and I think I
was really
privileged and happy to work on this character who is personification
of of an American archetype. He’s the ultimate orphan. He’s
the ultimate alien. He comes from another planet rather than another
continent. He’s an orphan like so many American characters are
where you have to invent yourself. He is the original mobility
man. I mean Americans are just . . . that’s all they are, mobile,
moving from one place to another, and here’s Superman, the first
character who could fly and go anywhere he wants basically in the blink
of an eye.
So he really connects to American fantasies and American archetypes.

But I think he’s also very . . . he’s
from the Heartland, he’s
very simple, and he’s very good. He might be considered corny sometimes,
but his philosophy would be, “You get what you
get, and you do what you can. You go out and you do the best that you
can.” That kind of very plain American philosophy, I think
it says something to us now. I mean, I don’t claim that this is
my 9/11 book, but I certainly was . . . it began, this book, right after
that when we were all
out in shock
from that thing and thinking, Oh, God, what has happened
to our country, and what are we becoming, and why are we reacting
like this, or acting like this, or reacting like this? And you get Superman
and you say, OK this is . . . you go back, and this is what you know,
this is what American can be and this is a plain, ordinary, hardworking,
decent
hero.

And I think that is one of the reasons I think why
the Superman movie is going to successful. Why Superman is . . . you
go
into any store you see this: Superman t-shirts, right? You go to the
automotive store there’s like Superman logos on steering wheel
covers and mud flaps for trucks. There’s something about
this character. It’s not just that the “S” is pretty
cool, because there’s other logos and images and symbols that have
lasted. And he’s been around for seventy years and that’s
why I think he just he kind of reinvents himself, or is reinvented, over
the decades.
And
he means different things to different time periods, and I think he means
something very specific to us now. And I think it’s going back
to he’s very basic ordinary midwestern, solid, decent, and that’s
what I had fun with. I really had fun with that because I could tease
it as Lois does and call him a “hayseed Harry” and a “Kansas
cornball” and all these kinds of things. But even she, I think,
she has a grudging respect for this guy who’s very dogged and just
does what he’s supposed to do and tries to help out. So I think
he’s a good character. It was an opportunity
for me to write a real hero. As flawed as he is, he’s not
really flawed. He’s still a good guy, as opposed to my other
characters, in my other books, who are really screwed up. So it was fun.
It was fun.

MD: Wel, thanks
so much for being here, and best of luck with the novel.

TD: Thanks, thanks Michaux. It was fun, good
questions, thanks very much.